The Internet makes it possible to make large quantities of information available to anyone with an internet browser. By and large this transfer of information is one-way from the author of a page to a group of internet browser users who have access to the information via a distributed network. Several systems are available that provide web page authors with the means to edit the code, such as HTML, of a web page directly from a web browser. These systems present a page author with a single editing region from which all of the code, e.g., HTML, of the web page is accessible and editable. Upon completion of any edits, the page author saves the updated page to, for example, a web server so that it can again be accessed by users.
The “Sparrow” system described by Bay-Wei Chang in “In-Place Editing of Web Pages: Sparrow Community-Shared Documents,” which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, allows a shared web page to be modified or added to by any contributor. Specifically, the Sparrow system allows a user to contribute to a web page in ways the page author has defined.
The universal nature of the world-wide web and the Internet makes it a practical platform for collaboration. Internet documents are accessible by a plurality of browsers, and browsers are commonly bundled on almost all computing platforms. However, the Internet does not lend itself to use as a collaborative work environment in which web pages are subject to editing and updating by a plurality of users. Web pages are generally treated as published documents that are owned, edited and made available by the original author.
The Sparrow system demonstrates that it possible to increase the information dissemination capabilities, by providing web pages that are not only viewable by many people, but can have their content modified by multiple people. However, while these web pages can have their content modified by multiple people without a knowledge of a computer language, creation and/or updating of the page that allows for the shared contributions can pose problems.
In the Sparrow system, a traditional HTML page can be made into a group-editable web page by adding several additional strings of HTML syntax, chiefly a set of templates and a set of data contributions or items. The templates describe what information contributions the page may contain, i.e., the number and kinds of data fields, and how those contributions will be formatted. An item is a single contribution, formatted according to the rules in one of the templates. Contributors add new contributions, or edit previous contributions, by filling in forms where these forms require no previous knowledge of HTML. With Sparrow, the page author can change the layout of such a page, or the format of its items, by reading the page into a text editor or HTML authoring tool and making edits to the overall page.